Recommendations from our site
“It didn’t teach us much about the science of volcanoes but it taught us the aphorism that man lives on this planet subject to geological consent which can be withdrawn at any time.” Read more...
Simon Winchester, Journalist
“Well, I’ve been drawn into this, partly because I’ve been writing about Pompeii. But also there is this incredible influence it has on anyone studying Pompeii. It’s the classic Pompeii disaster story everybody replays when they write about Pompeii. When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer. And what you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. The cultural backwash that came out of it was extraordinary. The characters, statues, movies.” Read more...
The best books on Ancient History in Modern life
Mary Beard, Classicist
The Last Days of Pompeii was a 19th century bestselling historical novel recommended to us by Cambridge classics professor and TV personality Mary Beard. “What you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world,” she says in her interview on books about ancient history in modern life.
